Stranger things have been seen in Berkeley, though, to be fair, many of them can be ascribed to the sensory enhancement caused by psychedelic drugs. Yet this, to the unaltered mind, is nothing if not trippy, for Natalie Coughlin seems to be going back in time.
Cruising slowly atop the water while on her back, Coughlin lifts her right arm upward, as if throwing a baseball, reaches forward, and slaps her outstretched hand down below the surface, just to the right of her thigh. She makes a similar motion with her left arm, all the while kicking in a counterintuitive downward-upward chop. Ten yards behind her, in the same lane, teammate Micha Burden is doing the same thing—as are the rest of the Golden Bears in various lanes at Spieker Pool on a brisk early-December morning.
The drill is known as reverse swimming, and seeing it from the deck is like scrolling through a televised swimming event on a TiVo rewind cycle. It is bizarre and intriguing and utterly Teri McKeever, a teacher who insists that her students not only complete her lessons but also understand the inherent value of what they’re learning.
If the typical college swim practice is as monotonous as a statistics lecture, McKeever’s workouts are more like extension-course seminars, with an emphasis on communication and experimentation. Unlike most coaches, McKeever makes a point of giving her swimmers the rationale behind her drills. When introducing them to reverse swimming, she talks about the deconstruction of their strokes as a means of erasing muscle memory and enhancing cognitive awareness of the body’s behavior during the various movements in each cycle. Further, the drill requires them to tune in to the principles of buoyancy by learning how to stay afloat when moving unnaturally.
“It helps with balance,” McKeever explains. “Things that you do to propel yourself forward when you’re unbalanced, like kicking, don’t work if you’re going backward. You have to figure out how to hold on to the water while going in an opposite direction—some people get it right away, and some struggle with it. Haley Cope could do every single stroke in reverse; it was uncanny. There are also elements of breathing involved: You learn to breathe with your body, rather than with your head. And really, it’s about achieving balance and body awareness by learning how to be centered and firm. Think of it like pushing a piece of spaghetti across a table. If it’s an uncooked piece of spaghetti, it moves the way you want it to. But if it’s a cooked, wet piece of spaghetti, you’re going to have a hard time getting it to go anywhere.”
Sometimes the explanations are far less involved. During a drill in which the swimmers use a pull buoy—a white cylindrical flotation device that rests between the upper thighs—McKeever is asked to describe its purpose. “It keeps your ass up,” she says, adding that by forcing a swimmer not to kick, it simulates flotation and allows her to concentrate on her upper-body movements; additionally, having her legs on the surface assists with body positioning. “It’s cheating,” she says, “but it allows you to focus on your upper body and not worry so much about the rest of the stroke during that period.”
Though not every Cal swimmer is sold on every drill, there isn’t much complaining when McKeever mandates something unique or unprecedented. If nothing else, the variety is welcome, for swimming is a sport in which the boredom of constantly chasing a black line at the bottom of the pool challenges the attention span. Because McKeever not only questions the effectiveness of such an approach but also disdains it on philosophical grounds, she devotes a lot of time and energy to keeping her workouts fresh—whereas someone like Irvine Novaquatics coach Dave Salo, who shares her sensibilities, is prone to improvisation, McKeever maps out virtually every lap of every practice.
The result is that even with a relatively traditional drill, there’s usually an experimental twist. For example, while the typical approach to interval training calls for short breaks between intense sprints, McKeever sometimes asks her swimmers, in lieu of heavy breathing, to take five “underwater bobs” before their next set. By inhaling deeply, sinking to the bottom of the pool, and then floating to the surface, typically exhaling just before they reach the top, the swimmers, McKeever feels, can reset their systems and achieve a purer form of rest before continuing the workout. “It’s relaxing for some people,” she says. “It evokes that same feeling you have when you’re a kid blowing bubbles in the water; it allows you to mentally and physically refocus.”
Underwater bobs force a swimmer to become comfortable with water falling over her face—a condition analogous to breathing during races. It also makes her more aware of the breathing process in general, so she uses her whole diaphragm rather than just her upper body.
Conventional coaches are most interested in output and intensity—above all, compelling swimmers to meet certain time standards and carry them out over extended periods—but McKeever focuses more on getting them to understand body mechanics and to feel those principles at work. She is fond of using props, many of which are housed in each swimmer’s mesh storage bag at the end of her practice lane. There are arm paddles (to increase strength and enhance the feeling of planting freestyle strokes under the surface and “holding” water), snorkels (to help create awareness of one’s “body line” during kickboard drills), and long pull cords that attach to a swimmer’s waist and are held by a partner on deck.
At first glance, the cords’ primary value appears to be resistance, and it’s true that attempting to reach the wall while being held back by a teammate 25 yards away is a serious strength builder. But it’s what happens after the turn that in McKeever’s eyes provides the greatest benefit.
“I’m trying to illustrate that coming off the wall, it’s never going to be any better,” McKeever explains. “That is the biggest push they’ll have during a race, and they’ll never be able to create more acceleration than that, no matter how much energy they expend. Then, after the turn, when they’re being pulled toward the people holding the cords, they’ll be going faster than they’d be able to on their own. I want them to feel the sensation of being that fast, to understand that it’s possible, and to achieve a comfort level at that pace.”
Similarly, the paddles accentuate the rotation of an arm into the water during the freestyle cycle—and, McKeever hopes, help to underscore another of her basic tenets: Instead of pulling backward with the arm as if to jet-stream the water back behind one’s body, the proper technique is to hold the position while letting the other arm propel the body forward. “It’s like walking,” she says. “You don’t slide one foot back while you move the other forward; you plant it and let the other side do the work. Ideally, you put your hand in the water and exit at the same spot.”
Balance is another of McKeever’s guiding principles—she advises her athletes to “swim from your core” or “swim from your middle,” language similar to that used in the yoga and Pilates classes in which the Bears are required to participate. During various drills, she asks the Bears to “breathe from your lower ribs, instead of your chest,” and likens the body’s core to an engine that, rather than the arms or legs, should be the primary force propelling them through the water.
Instead of beginning every drill from a wall, McKeever might have the swimmers float on their backs or stomachs and, midway through a lap, break into a stroke—all so they’ll experience the sensation of swimming from the core. “This forces you to check in with your body position,” McKeever explains. “When you start from a floating position, you have to figure out a way to propel yourself in a more organic way; you can’t just kick or use your hands or do something that might work off a wall.
Natalie does this really well. She’s great at generating propulsion and keeping her line while moving from her center.”
McKeever attempts to accomplish something similar with rotational kicks, in which a swimmer places her hands on her thighs while propelling herself forward or backward. Sometimes, to combat the sensory overload that occurs during turns, she’ll mandate rapid-fire stroke changes in the middle of the pool. This often takes the form of a “3-3 transition”—three strokes of one discipline followed by an abrupt switch to another—which makes swimmers aware of their head and body positions, flotation, and breathing patterns. Sets are frequently interspersed with “balance up” turns in which swimmers, after pushing off a wall, float passively for a count of 10 “Golden Bears” before resuming. During the takeoff, McKeever reminds them to “lengthen your necks…feel the length as you start swimming…make sure not to hunch your shoulders.”
Similarly, a “board roll-off”—the swimmer places her torso on a kickboard, rolls sideways into the water, and then swims a few yards, using only her arms before starting to kick—is designed to help McKeever’s charges feel what their bodies are like when perfectly balanced. It also helps with hand positioning among freestylers, especially those who don’t dig deep enough. “Ideally, you should swing your hand to a position below the water’s surface,” McKeever says. “A lot of swimmers tend to come in too high when they’re swimming normally, but when you lay on a board, it forces you go low.”
Conversely, keeping the feet from sinking too far under the water is an objective of McKeever’s snorkel-kickboard drills. “The way you normally kick with a board is really unnatural and bad for your shoulders,” explains distance-freestyler and butterflier Erin Reilly. “Kicking with the snorkel, and just holding the bottom of the board, helps you control your body line and kick with your whole leg.”
McKeever is also a fan of “one-armed swimming,” in which a swimmer completes only half of a stroke cycle and floats passively in the interim. “So many coaches just tell you to do drills and never tell you what the point is,” says Jen Strasburger, a former North Carolina standout who, while attending graduate school at Cal, served as McKeever’s volunteer assistant during Coughlin’s senior season. “One-armed swimming helps with balance and rotation, but I never knew that. I’ve never seen someone who’s as technically precise as Teri. She understands technique and explains how to use it. She’s willing to listen and to try new things, and she keeps it interesting. These swimmers are used to variety, so maybe they don’t appreciate it, but I came from a world in which a set was, like, ‘10 × 400—go.’ With Teri, there’s a lot more variety, and it’s for a purpose, too.”
This is not to suggest that McKeever’s sole purpose is to provide her swimmers with some sort of touchy-feely oneness with the water. She obviously wants them to go fast during races, and she shares many of Salo’s race-pace sensibilities. Often, while her swimmers are in a floating position, McKeever will blow a whistle, summoning an immediate sprint from a dead stop. This, too, teaches them to accelerate from their center. “A lot of it is about energy level and being able to tap into that energy when it’s needed,” Whitney Hite explains. “It’s like a light switch that you can turn on and off, instead of the old model, which is ‘Let’s turn it on and see how long we can burn it.’ ”
Similarly, McKeever uses the concept of “hand hits”—rapid, race-sharp bursts—to help her swimmers learn to manage their breathing during races. Since breathing in or out of a wall is a strategic no-no, McKeever will mandate, for example, three hand hits just after a wall so the swimmers accelerate coming out of a wall without breaking stride for needless breaths.
McKeever, more than most of her peers, gives individualized instruction during group workouts and insists on involving her swimmers in the process. For example, when working on turns, she often requires each Bear to pick a partner: One turns while the other trails behind and observes, then provides instant feedback.
“Teri’s very specific,” Hite says. “With her, it’s all about pinpoint accuracy. It makes sense, because that’s how she lives her life.”
There is an intensely psychological component to McKeever’s approach. She may not pound swimmers into submission the way many of her peers do, but she does push them to the brink and create a race-tough mentality that they carry into competition. One obvious way to do this is through the dreaded hypoxic exercises, the very mention of which has been known to provoke tears, yelps, and even panic attacks among the Bears. A set might consist of the following: 75 yards of freestyle, with three breaths; two 50s under/over, each with an underwater lap followed by a 25-yard sprint with no breath; then an easy double-arm backstroke length followed by another 25-yard, no-breath sprint. Then, without rest, the whole set is repeated—again, and again, and again, and yet again. If anyone breathes, the entire team might be asked to repeat the set.
This not only engenders mental toughness but also helps the swimmers to understand the difference between wanting to breathe and needing to. McKeever hopes that the hypoxic work will also help swimmers plow through taxing periods when racing and, for those final strokes at the end of races, understand that furious sprints are possible when out of breath.
Even when the Bears do breathe, the process may be unconventional. Another of McKeever’s favorite devices is “alligator breathing”: When a swimmer gets to the wall, she opens her mouth wide and takes in water while breathing through her nose. This allows her nervous system to adapt to a foreign feeling—to become comfortable breathing with water in the back of her mouth. Breathing with only half of one’s mouth out of the water is an efficient race strategy. “It teaches you to read where the water is on your face,” McKeever says, “to learn when you can and can’t take a breath in a race.” According to stroke guru Milt Nelms, alligator breathing also has a theoretical purpose: to combat the brain’s primitive need for air, thus instilling a sense of comfort in situations when oxygen is scarce, such as at the end of a race. (It also kills any germs that may have entered her mouth during the previous 24 hours, but the chlorine-induced oral cleansing is merely an ancillary benefit.)
Put all of this together and you have what might be termed the McKeever Model, an approach to coaching competitive swimmers that even the most charitable of her peers would deem highly unconventional. Yet to Coughlin, who had experienced both extremes, McKeever’s teachings made perfect sense—it was the Ray Mitchells of the world who espoused a philosophy that belonged out on the fringe. “The swimming mentality is so stupid,” Coughlin says. “So many people are so worried about yardage—who trains harder than who—and they just mindlessly go back and forth and beat themselves into the ground. People will say, ‘I swam so-and-so yards today.’ Big frickin’ deal! It’s so frustrating, because so much of the swimming community is focused on yardage, yet that’s just one piece of a big puzzle. A lot of coaches are arrogant and won’t step outside the box. There are very, very few coaches willing to look at it from a different perspective.”
As Coughlin made her push for Athens, it became clear that striking Olympic gold wasn’t merely a quest for personal glory. She felt she’d also be striking a chord for change—making a statement about the pathology of the predominant swimming culture and sending a message that an alternative approach such as McKeever’s could be successful on the grandest of stages. That meant a great deal to Coughlin, who resented the unquestioned tenets of the culture and the way in which dissenters were marginalized. She hated competing in a world in which, in the words of former Southern Methodist University swimmer McCall Dorr, “coaches throw eggs against the wall, and the egg that doesn’t break is the fastest swimmer.”
The truth was that Coughlin, by the end of her time with Mitchell, had been perilously close to cracking. Only with McKeever’s careful and thoughtful handling did she rediscover her love for the sport and once again summon the intensely competitive will that had made her a star in the first place.
Coughlin knew that especially after her physical breakdown in Barcelona, there were legions of traditionalists quietly looking forward to the day she would fall flat in Athens, thus reaffirming their more-is-better training tenets. She understood that those people regarded her early successes at Cal as a carryover from her hard-core yardage at Terrapins, which they now theorized had begun to wear off. Hell, even some of her teammates, bothered by Coughlin’s penchant for begging off drills she felt weren’t helpful to her preparation, were in this camp. So yeah, a lot would be on the line during these next 8 months. She was swimming not just for herself, her coach, her school, and her country but also for the legitimacy of an entire philosophical shift.
Fail in Athens, and the revolution was dead.
This, more than anything, was the reason Coughlin couldn’t try to overextend and chase history like Michael Phelps: Too much was at stake. Win the 100 back, and she’d be smiling, waving proof that her and McKeever’s approach works, and her critics could kiss her gold medal until the end of time. But it wasn’t just about proving she was right: Coughlin already knew that, win or lose. More than anything, she felt a gnawing pressure to serve her sport, specifically those who would follow her into swimming’s highest echelons, by validating a divergent path to glory.
“As much as I love swimming, and as great a lifestyle as it can provide for a child in so many ways, there are moments when I think I’d have a hard time telling someone’s kid to join a competitive swimming club, because the culture is so messed up,” Coughlin says. “It’s all about accumulating yardage and practicing 11 times a week—arrogant coaches saying, ‘We do 10 grand a day, blah, blah, blah’—and who needs to get your ass kicked like that when you’re 12 years old? No wonder so many kids quit swimming and become water polo players.
“It’s frustrating, because so many coaches act like, ‘This is the only right way to do this, and if you don’t do it this way, you can’t succeed.’ They’re not as open to new ideas as they should be.”
To Coughlin, it wasn’t just that swim coaches told kids what to do and when to do it; coaches tend to do that in any sport. What truly offended her was the utter certainty with which they espoused their theories, regardless of whether or not there was any scientific basis behind them. For example, one morning over breakfast at Fatapple’s in Berkeley, Coughlin, sounding exasperated, brought up the universally accepted concept of a swimmer’s aerobic base. “Some people would tell you that the reason I’m able to go so fast now is because of the aerobic base I built up when I was younger; that because of all the yardage I put in then, I can draw on that in my races now,” she said. “I mean, give me a break—how long does an aerobic base supposedly last? Five years? Seven years? Longer? Is anything that I’m doing now responsible for my success, or is it all because of how hard I worked as a kid?”
To Milt Nelms, the problem wasn’t that the notion of an aerobic base had no validity—it might, for all he knew. The problem was that this and other tenets espoused by most coaches were presumed true unless a preponderance of evidence indicated otherwise. In his eyes, not only did the prevalent training model have no scientific basis, but based on what he’d learned from scientifically trained peers, it was the antithesis of science. “The scientific method holds that everything is doubted until proven true,” Nelms explains. “But many American swimming coaches, even when they acquire scientific information, don’t apply science as scientists should. They operate from a premise that their method is the right one unless proven otherwise—and sometimes, even when science does prove it’s not the right way, they disregard that knowledge.”
Salo, who has a doctorate in exercise physiology, also bemoans the lack of scientific basis behind the preachings of his peers. “They argue that you need what they call an ‘aerobic base,’ but if you ask them to define it, they can’t,” he says. “The assumption is that if you have this basic training, you can swim fast later on. My argument is that you can develop your aerobic base without lots of volume. If I go out and run 10-meter sprints with 30-second breaks, my metabolism is still riding high, and those are more like race conditions. You engage all of your fibers with short, fast stuff, but only some of them at a time when you go long and slow.”
Yet most prominent coaches insist on volume at all costs, even for sprinters. It’s as if Carl Lewis or Marion Jones were being asked to run a pair of 10-Ks daily to prepare for their 100- and 200-meter races. Coughlin, while attending a ceremony in Dallas to accept the 2002 Honda Award as the nation’s best collegiate swimmer, recalls swapping training stories with USC track star Angela Williams, a sprinter: “She was blown away by what they ask us to do. The thought of her running a mile, even, to prepare for one of her races was just preposterous.”
Asks Salo: “If you’re only doing an event that lasts 2 minutes and you’re essentially doing a marathon every day to prepare—why would you do that?”
There are many answers to that question, but the most significant one is this: because some exceptionally fast swimmers tried it, and it worked for them.
Back in the 1930s, the Japanese had designs on taking over the world—the swimming world, that is. Competitive swimming had been around since the middle of the 19th century, and training had focused almost exclusively on technique, with trial and error being the prevalent strategy. Then, after photographing world-class swimmers underwater to study their stroke mechanics, Japanese coaches augmented that focus on technique by instituting an intense conditioning program, one that included daily swims of up to 5 miles. During the 1932 and 1936 Olympics, Japanese men proceeded to win 19 of the possible 30 swimming medals. There were few imitators, however, and World War II effectively destroyed the Japanese swimming program.
Then, 2 decades later, the Australians began what Nelms calls the Arms Race: After intensive interval training, the host Aussies utterly dominated the swimming events at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, winning 14 medals after having captured only one at the previous Games 4 years earlier. Among the medals were gold-silver-bronze sweeps in the men’s and women’s 100-meter freestyles, as well as gold medals and world records in both relays (800 free for men, 400 free for women) contested at the time. In the men’s race, Australia beat the US team by nearly 8 seconds.
This time, imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. By instituting interval training, the Aussies had borrowed a track-and-field concept that called for a specific number of brisk runs at a set distance, without enough rest to allow for recovery. In that sense, their model was similar to the one Salo employs today, but with much higher volume. The Americans were the biggest copycats, and many US experts turned to science in an attempt to gain an edge. In 1959, the book Swimming and Diving, by James Armbruster, Robert Allen, and Bruce Harlan, detailed a comprehensive approach that included year-round training, pace work, and core body-strength exercises. That was followed, in 1968, by Indiana coach James (Doc) Counsilman’s The Science of Swimming, which heralded interval training but cautioned against overkill. Counsilman, the US Olympic coach in 1964 and 1976, was a trained scientist who explained how the laws of physics govern stroke mechanics and espoused a three-stage approach to understanding swimming from a scientific perspective: curiosity, confusion, and comprehension. He began analyzing stroke mechanics via underwater motion camera in 1948 and later used the technique to illustrate the “Bernouli effect”—that swimmers propel mainly by means of lift propulsion.
Counsilman’s star swimmer at Indiana University, Mark Spitz, became a worldwide celebrity after his seven-gold-medal performance at the 1972 Olympics, with Australia’s Shane Gould emerging as the Southern Hemisphere’s superstar. As the sport’s popularity increased, so, too, did the obsession with volume. During the mid-’70s, Mission Viejo Nadadores coach Mark Schubert created the infamous “Animal Lane,” in which world-class swimmers such as Brian Goodell, Shirley Babashoff, Jesse Vassallo, and Casey Converse covered unprecedented distances on a regular basis. “We knew we were doing things no one had ever done before,” Goodell told Swimming World magazine in July 2004, noting that the group was training 15,000 to 20,000 meters a day, 6 days a week. “It gave us an edge going into races—we always knew we’d be strong at the end.”
There’s little doubt that some athletes, especially those in endurance events, respond to massive amounts of preparation. But it’s also true that other athletes, particularly those asked to make rapid-fire, explosive bursts, aren’t suited to such a model. I’m reminded of a comment made by NFL Hall of Famer Jim Brown, probably the greatest running back in football history. As we stood on the pool deck of his picturesque backyard in the Hollywood Hills, he was telling then rookie halfback Ricky Williams, the reigning Heisman Trophy winner, why he’d never felt compelled to display his skills as a blocker during games: “If you get a Thoroughbred horse,” Brown said, “are you gonna have him pull a milk truck?”
Nelms, who often likens Coughlin to a cat or a cheetah—she saves up energy for the hunt and thus is less able to devote it to nonessential pursuits—offers an analogy similar to Brown’s: “She’s not a 1-ton pickup. She’s a Ferrari. A Ferrari can’t pull a wagon, but it can still race.”
Yet swimming coaches, like their counterparts in other sports, tend to see value in pushing their charges to physical exhaustion. “Pounding is a way to make coaches look good,” former Cal star Cope says. “If you think about it, you bring the greatest amount of people from a mediocre level to a less mediocre one. Of course, you burn out some people that way, but the ones who don’t tend to get faster. Athletes don’t help, either. They’re proud of the fact that they can hold a certain time for this many thousand yards—they get reliant on that, instead of learning the way their own bodies function.”
The result is that coaches, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, are deeply resistant to change. When Salo’s race-pace ideas began translating into tangible success—in the form of internationally prominent swimmers like Amanda Beard, Aaron Peirsol, Jason Lezak, Gabrielle Rose, and Colleen Lanne—it’s amazing how few of his peers grasped the significance. “You would’ve thought he’d have created a revolution in swimming,” Nelms says, “but he hasn’t. Partly, that’s because he won’t talk about what he does. But it’s also because people aren’t open to changing the paradigm. Any science that flies in the face of the culture is rejected.”
What infuriates Nelms is that the hallowed tenets of the mainstream swimming culture are so specious. After all, it’s not as if the model is based on some sound theoretical premise. The American swim-club system, in Nelms’s eyes, “is a cultural product. It came from nonworking mothers of middle-class families sitting around the swim club and staging bake sales so they could pay the aquatics director an extra $300 a month to be the coach. Age-group divisions were arbitrary, not based on development. Even into the ’70s, we had a bunch of mostly mom-and-pop swim clubs being coached by pool managers and part-timers and volunteers. We don’t have a designed, developmental system, and now there’s so much inertia that the system is incredibly resistant to change.”
As with any sport, says Nelms, “the culture is conservative. There tends to be this incestuous thing—athletes become coaches, who turn out the next wave of athletes, and everybody protects one another’s interests. I figured this out from observing my own patterns and tendencies—I found I was repeating what I had done and been taught to do. People are scared by any new way of thinking, and every shift comes from within the swimming culture and will reflect the aberrations and distortions within that culture.”
What makes swimming particularly egregious is that the culture is so undeveloped. “Really, the sport is at the beginning of its evolution,” Nelms says. “It has only been broadly, professionally coached for 30 or 40 years. Compare martial arts, which have been around for thousands of years, with swimming, which takes place in a much more complex environment. Yet swimming has developed culturally more than scientifically.”
One telling indication of the culture’s lack of scientific legitimacy is the ease with which anyone can pass off him or herself as a swim coach. “You can’t get a bachelor’s degree in swim coaching,” Nelms scoffs, “but you or I can pay $50 to USA Swimming and pass a multiple-choice test to become a certified swim coach. There’s also a so-called professional organization, ASCA (American Swimming Coaches Association). There are many well-meaning and sincere people working as coaches, but there’s no way to differentiate them from the dubious ones. If you take a test and can flog enough little kids to make them swim fast enough, you can move through the ranks.”
This is a culture, then, that is both unevolved and undiscerning. Yet so many coaches within it have no problem coming up with pseudoscientific justifications for their training techniques. “The people in it want to tell you they’re using science,” Nelms says, “but if you just go buy a little pamphlet, ‘Science Process for Dummies,’ you can challenge all the science that they’re supposedly citing. The research is fundamentally flawed: When you research a population trained with the same method and told to perform the same way, what kind of results are you going to get? The fact is, and I include myself here, we don’t know anything about the human body—how it operates underwater and what really happens when it moves in that environment. We don’t even know how some fish move as fast as they do—look at Gray’s paradox, which holds that fish don’t seem to have enough muscle power to propel themselves at the speeds they do. So most of us pick anecdotal bits of information, but mostly what we do is imitate whatever the mythology is that jumps out from our best athletes. It’s like, ‘What did Ian Thorpe do?’ or ‘What did Michael Phelps do?’ But if the methodology of training Michael Phelps is what made him great, well, he isn’t training alone. There are 30 other people in his training group. Where are the other multiple gold medalists and world record holders?”
Nelms is the first to remind anyone who’ll listen that he himself is not a scientist. But he does understand enough about physiology to harbor some serious concerns about the way the majority of young people in his sport are handled. “From what I’ve been told, there are several growth phases in a natural sleep cycle. Studies have shown that at 1:30 or 2 a.m., kids begin to secrete the growth hormone,” he says. “If somebody interrupts that secretion cycle to get you up to train at 5 in the morning throughout your childhood, what does that do to your body? Somebody, explain to me how that’s good for us.” According to Nelms, a New Zealand coach observed a pair of identical twins, both of whom were swimmers. One quit and, within 5 months, grew 4 inches taller; the other kept swimming and did not experience a similar spurt.
Even scientific principles that seem grounded in fact bother Nelms. For instance, when asked about the notion of an aerobic base, he concedes that “there’s scientific evidence that points to the fact that your aerobic potential is shaped during childhood.” Yet he finds the conclusion that high-volume training is the best way to maximize that potential to be absurd. “Swimming is an aggressive, monolithic activity,” he says. “What a child is designed for is variety. To go after your aerobic base with the same continuous activity 4 hours a day is probably not the best for development. The fact is that if there’s an aggressive, assertive stress in the environment, we will borrow resources from other qualities to meet that stress. It’s a survival mechanism, not a developmental one. The coach says, ‘Whoa, it works; hit ’em again.’ But what appears to be adaptation is in fact a survival mechanism.
“In terms of a young girl’s actual swimming potential, it probably would be better to dive for rings at the bottom of the pool or play Marco Polo than to do what these girls are doing. It’s nice to have an aerobic base, but you need a sensory base, a base of skeletal strength, a base of rhythm, and a neurological base—all of which are compromised by doing a single activity like swimming. What youth sports do is not what Mother Nature wants done. Just look at the typical case of a female swimmer. She borrows until there’s nothing left to draw on, and one day you get a drawn, puppy-dog-looking 14- or 15-year-old girl who says, ‘I quit.’ She doesn’t even know why, but some mechanism of the organism says, ‘You will die, or you will not be healthy enough to procreate, unless you change environments.’ That’s not an adaptive base. That’s a maladaptive one.”
Similarly, Nelms looks at Mitchell’s reliance on cutting-edge physical data—when Coughlin was there, he constantly measured her and the other Terrapins’ heart rates and ordered frequent lactate and blood tests—as another implementation of “science as convenience.”
“From what Natalie has told me, Ray kept meticulous heart-rate records on his kids. But really, I suspect it was all about measuring work or effort over time,” says Nelms. “It was used to support his opinion of how kids should be trained. He had them wear heart monitors”—Coughlin and her friends referred to these as Big Brother—“to bed that would download information, the idea being that one of the effects of overtraining is that your heart rate won’t go down at night. Looking at it generously, he didn’t want Natalie to overtrain for her own well-being. Looking at it cynically, he didn’t want her to overtrain and fail to perform because of it. I speak from personal experience here—I did many similar things as a coach, because the performance of the kids I coached impacted the respect I received in the swimming community.”
Coughlin, too, suspects that Mitchell had his own interests at heart when he administered the tests. Because of that and other experiences, she is often suspicious when coaches or officials cite science to justify a certain training approach. Certainly, there are times in which scientific study has enhanced competitive swimming—for example, the instant ear-prick tests that measure lactic acid in the blood during warm-down swims, thus alerting swimmers to the optimal number of laps they need to put in after competition to avoid lingering pain. Though Nelms is mostly dismissive of the bureaucracy at USA Swimming, he cites physiology director Genadijus Sokolovas, a former Soviet (Lithuanian) modern pentathlete with a PhD, as an “expert on the symptoms of overtraining. He supplies responsible information. He is also an undisputed, nationally recogized expert on appropriate levels of stimulation for children in various stages of development. He is the consummate scientist because he considers all information and constantly challenges his own assumptions, and even his own research.”
Yet along with scientific feedback, McKeever and Coughlin had come to place great trust in their instincts. Says Nelms: “Both are intuitive people who are skeptical of being told how you should swim. There’s a lot of abstract in swimming, and swimming is a pleasurable physical experience—Natalie gets it in her gut. For her it’s an activity that’s dynamic and movement oriented, and all the statistics and data dispensed by USA Swimming and ASCA and other swimming beaurocricies around the world, when not analyzed properly, take away from that.”
Both McKeever and Coughlin rejected the prevalent training model to such a degree that they quarreled even with some of its standard language. Unlike her peers, who swore by the time-tested strategy of “tapering” before big competitions, McKeever chose not to use the term. Rather than pushing the body beyond its limits and then drastically reducing yardage to simulate rest, McKeever simply viewed her equivalent strategy—tipping the training scales further toward the mental realm as a major competition neared—as fine-tuning a group of healthy, well-trained athletes. She wouldn’t even say the “T word” at workouts or in meetings, instead talking about being “fine-tuned—with more rest, and sharper and crisper workouts that are more intense and race ready.”
After an unimpressive performance in a big meet, a swimmer would often rationalize her disappointment by saying “I missed my taper,” meaning that the coach had failed to reduce workout volumes at the appropriate time. McKeever loathed that; she considered it the epitome of unaccountability. “A taper isn’t just in the pool,” she says. “It’s about getting race ready in all phases: How are you sleeping? How are you eating? It’s a partnership between athlete and coach, and the athlete has a responsibility to be interactive and communicative. It’s not about magically performing better because your coach reduced your distance by the prescribed amount.”
To McKeever, the intense cardio work favored by traditionalists certainly had its place, but she had come to believe that such preparation need not be water specific. Spin classes and sustained, fast-paced dry-land workouts, she felt, could be substituted at times for marathon swimming sessions; that way, the preparation in the water could be more race specific and technique oriented. “The idea is that you’re training the engine,” McKeever explains. “The engine—your body—doesn’t know if you’re biking, running, or swimming; it just knows it’s being pushed.”
This philosophy had been partly shaped by the realities of coaching at Cal. “Going to school here, you can’t train 100,000 meters a week,” McKeever muses. “The schoolwork is too intense. Besides, we don’t have the pool that long, because we share it with the men and both water polo teams. So we have to find a different way to stress the organism. This is good, because my overall philosophy is that there are a lot of ways to be successful, and we’re trying to expose people to as many of them as possible. The idea is to have as many tools in your chest as you can when it’s time to go out there and compete.”
Coughlin, for her part, was so down on the culture that she innately identified with anyone presumed to be part of the counterculture. She found herself both rooting for and defending sprinters Gary Hall Jr. and Anthony Ervin—and, for that matter, her friend Haley Cope—because their idiosyncratic personalities and unconventional training methods caused them to be branded as rebels. “Look at Gary Hall,” she said following the 2004 Olympics, when Hall, at 29, became the oldest American swimmer to compete in the Games since Hawaiian sensation Duke Kahanamoku in 1924. (Incidentally, Coughlin’s maternal uncle—her mother’s brother—is married to a woman who is a descendant of “the Duke.”) “People like to portray him as a slacker, but maybe he’s just an amazing athlete who has an interesting way to train.”
She also came to view the way she had been trained as a child as somewhat dysfunctional. “I remember a conversation I had in 2001 with Cristina Teuscher, who had won a gold medal at the ’96 Olympics (in the 800 free relay) and a bronze in 2000 (in the 200 IM),” Coughlin says. “When I was younger, people would always ask things like ‘What’s your average of 10 × 400 back-to-back?’ as if that were important. Christina said, ‘You can’t do 10 × 400 as fast as you used to, but you can do one 400 faster.’ That comment has stuck with me ever since. The sad thing for kids is, if you train at that level I used to train at all the time, you can only go one gear.”
Eight months removed from potential Olympic glory, Coughlin was tantalized by the possibility of achieving a platform that could help change the paradigm. She didn’t merely want to be a role model for kids; she wanted to play a role in helping to improve the old model, by creating a more complex, saner paradigm in its place.
Something had to be done; that was nonnegotiable. Otherwise, when Coughlin looked into the eyes of those awestruck kids begging her to sign their swim caps, how long would she be able to resist the compelling urge to tell them what she sometimes felt: Get out, now, before this sport devours your body and spirit. Trust me. I know.